Princeton University’s Board of Trustees fired Classics professor Joshua Katz, the university said in a Monday statement, claiming that the longtime faculty member “failed to be straightforward” during a 2018 investigation into a relationship between Katz and an undergraduate student.
Katz told National Review that he learned that he’d been fired only after the New York Times called his wife, and said the university sent his notice of termination to the wrong email address.
Katz was briefly suspended from the university in 2018 over the consensual relationship, which occurred about 15 years ago.
However, the Board voted to fire Katz following a “detailed written complaint” in 2021 “from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Dr. Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision,” the university said in a statement to the New York Times. A new investigation “established multiple instances in which Dr. Katz misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward” in the university’s 2018 investigation.
Allies of Katz, who has tenure, have claimed that the firing was motivated by the professor’s criticism of Princeton’s “anti-racism” initiatives. In a 2020 essay for Quillette, Katz criticized a faculty letter stating that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” and referred to a student group called the Black Justice League as “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members' demands.”
Katz offered to resign from the university weeks ago, but Princeton’s administration did not want to relinquish the ability to state publicly that the university president recommended the firing, Katz’s lawyer confirmed to National Review earlier on Monday.
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